“I’ll do it,” Barrows said without pause.
“Try to control your urges. You’ll probably fail for now, and that’s all right.”
He took the prescription, looked at it as if gazing upon something dear. For a moment, he wanted to cry.
After all these years, he’d found someone who would help him.
Time to start going back to church, he thought.
Dr. Untermann’s regal face appraised him, and she smiled. “Have no fear, Mr. Barrows. You’ve made the first, most crucial step. You’ve come for help. And I’ll help you. So many other never do that. We’ll see this thing through… and fix it.”
Barrows felt choked up as he stood. “Thank you…” His gaze drifted from her face to the wall behind her, which was covered with degrees and certificates. “You must be… pretty good.”
“Not to sound pretentious, Mr. Barrows, but as for treating cases such as yours, I’m probably the best in the country. Go home now. Think about what we’ve discussed, and envision the end of your affliction.”
“I will.”
“Tomorrow at six, then?”
“Yes…”
“And get that prescription filled tonight.”
“I will.”
She lit another long slim cigarette: long and slim and refined like herself. “Goodnight, Mr. Barrows.”
Misty-eyed, Barrows left the office. Part of his psyche, of course, urged him to head right back down to his hunting grounds and search for the strange, tender morsels of his need.
But not tonight.
Because as he made his exit from the frosty, handsome woman’s office, he realized he was leaving with something he’d never had in the last two decades.
He was leaving with hope.
It was like heroin. It was like high-grade crack or freshly distilled crystal meth. Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders affected the same neurotransmitters that the most highly addictive narcotics affected. Marsha. Untermann had seen enough victims to know not only this but the ultimate implications.
You always start a patient off with a positive purview—that was essential—but the rest was never easy. Sometimes it was impossible, and Dr. Untermann knew impossible when she saw it.
She knew that Barrows wouldn’t make it.
Her black Bally high heels clicked along the clean cement of the parking garage beneath the twenty-story mirror-faceted Millennium Tower, and it was a nice, new black Mercedes 450 that she slid into. She lit another cigarette—a beastly habit, she knew—but didn’t yet start the engine and leave for her lakeside Fremont condo. Instead…
She thought.
Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders—OCD’s? Especially the really radical ones?
The trichotillomanics, the aphasics, the dysgeusaics? The success rate was actually so low, it was scarcely worth treatment. It was actually less than the seven-percent success-rate for crack addicts. Much less.
The same went for the disorders akin to dritiphily.
Dr. Untermann had learned much in her nearly thirty years of abnormal clinical psychiatry. She’d learned that some things weren’t worth trying to treat.
She heard the footsteps even before the figure turned the corner. She powered down the driver’s side window.
“I got a lot this time,” a sand-papery voice told her.
“I’m pleased.”
Dirty hands passed in the parcel. Untermann took it and handed the figure a $100 bill. “Thank you,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
Her purveyor said nothing in response. He simply took the money and walked away. The back of his coat read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER.
Untermann gave a hot sigh when she opened the parceclass="underline" a paper bag containing a plastic Zip-Loc bag, the one-gallon size. She unzipped the bag, inhaled the aroma, and nearly swooned; the bag was heavy with various vomit. Gritty. Fuming.
Like chunky, pink oatmeal.
No, some things weren’t worth trying to treat. But capitulation was a treatment of its own, wasn’t it? Sometimes you just had to surrender to the incontrovertible truth.
Be who you are, she thought in the ultimate Freudian nod. She flicked out her cigarette. Accept it, and adapt.
That’s what she had done. And it worked. The verity of the soul, however unseemly at times, must always be embraced. Not ignored or fought against.
Embraced.
And now this fox financier, this man Barrows. Smart, successful, rich. And more than pleasing to the eye. When Barrows learned that there really was no cure for his disease, he, too, would capitulate… and the two of them would embrace each other.
Her nipples suddenly stood out beneath the lacy cotton bra and sheer Biagiotti cashmere blouse. Her sex moistened; her teeth ground. In her mind, she saw Barrows forlornly straying the city’s most malodorous streets and alleyways, searching for those all-too-precious nuggets, scraping them up and sucking them down like so many melted diamonds. She saw his trembling lips jacked needily open as unwashed derelicts and dirty, wan whores hacked up veritable collops of meaty phlegm into his mouth. His own uniqueness was all too similar to Untermann’s own.
I’ll show him how to adapt, just as I have adapted…
I’ll teach him how to function, unscathed.
We’ll be who we both really are. Not in social fallacy but in truth.
Two human beings one in the same.
Together.
Dr. Untermann finally started the car and drove out of the parking garage. The bag sat beside her in the fine leather passenger seat. She couldn’t wait to get home—
Oh, yes…
—to eat.
GRUB GIRL IN THE PRISON OF DEAD WOMEN
Sure, hon, I got some time. I’ll tell you the whole thing while you make up your mind. And this is no bullshit, either. You can read about it in the papers.
You know about Grubs, right? No? Shit, man, you from overseas or something? I’ll make a long story short. “Grubs” are what they call us, same way they call black people niggers. Nice tag, huh? But I guess we are a little on the pasty side. But, look, don’t get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don’t know, a couple of years ago. Christ, I’m sure you heard about that. NASA and the Air Force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some shit, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. “The ultimate deterrent,” the President said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this flop. What they didn’t announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn’t worried about it ’cos it flew so high, the shit would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something fucked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the east coast at treetop level on something they called an “emergency urban alert bomb mode” for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for shit’s sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get rained on by this thing.